a) Field of the Invention
The invention is directed to a microscope, particularly a laser scanning microscope, with an adaptive optical device for variable adaptation of the illumination beam path and/or detection beam path to the characteristics of the optical component groups and/or to the characteristics of the sample.
b) Description of the Related Art
The use of adaptive optics in microscopes is already known, per se, in the prior art and is described, for example, in PCT/WO99/06656. However, the use of the adaptive optics in the illumination beam path and/or detection beam path as is disclosed therein requires the use of at least one beam splitter which must be incorporated in the design resulting in optical losses.
Coupling adaptive elements into the beam path without losses by means of mirrors as is shown in principle in the accompanying drawing labeled “prior art” is also known, but leads to additional substantial aberrations due to the oblique incidence of the beam path on the reflector faces.
Further, the prior art requires interaction between the adaptive optical elements and a wavefront sensor, so that further losses occur in general.
Formerly conventional sensors such as Shack-Hartmann sensors or interferometers are used as wavefront sensors in this connection as is indicated, for example, in PCT/GB99/03194. However, sensors of this kind are not well suited to three-dimensional scanning of a sample as is intended with a confocal laser scanning microscope. This is due to the fact that, in contrast to confocal detection, a relatively large amount of unfocused light strikes the sensor.